i hope this reaches her in time / accepting ➟
( @slippped ) ————
❝ we sway like a bed of roses in the wind ❞
of all the flowers, she chose roses.
the man wanted to laugh but the sound caught on the back of his throat. a halfhearted huff was all that escaped before he swallowed the rest.
roses. such a simple name for a flower that could be so cataclysmically different depending on the planet they were from. what fragile beauty came to mind when their name fell from her tongue? seasonal visitors, here and gone with the ebb of rotations? petals of decadent colors that covered the ground in velvet as time decayed?
or were they more like the variant on chandrila? a diabolic breed of flora that grew like a weed on both land and sea. it's twisted vines were hard, coral-like structures that suffocated trees and reefs alike. their roots were gluttonous tendrils that reached through the earth to find the next warm body. veins of stolen blood spidered across the color-shifting corollas. from teal to cerulean to violet to jade wherever daring beams of sunlight touched.
chandrilan roses did not sway. they buffeted. their thorns lengthened into perilous claws, their vines tightened into stony cocoons. untouchable, willingly driven into the depths of self-made prison.
❝ our thorns are not the same. ❞